AKASHA, which stands for Advanced Knowledge Architecture for Social Human Advocacy just announced that their pre-alpha version of AKASHA will be launched in October.

AKASHA, the newest decentralized social media network, created by Mihai Alisie (Bitcoin Magazine creator and Ethereum co-founder), aims to create a new social media network, free from the constraints of the old.

Users who have already added their emails to the pre-alpha list will receive Invites in their inboxes which will include installation instructions. During their first rollout, they plan to test the basic core features such as creating an identity, following a person, publishing an entry, commenting, bookmarking, voting, following a tag, creating a tag and so on. During this phase, the AKASHA team will be testing the rest of the functionality in anticipation of the alpha release.

In these first releases, the Dapp may showcase unstable behavior and a few bugs. AKASHA notes that this is to be expected since this is the first experimentation of a standalone Dapp that’s built with innovative technologies such as Ethereum and IPFS.

“There are many moving parts involved in making this happen and there will be things that are expected to manifest unexpected behavior”

Here is their breakdown of all their stages with their goals and implementation:

Stage 1 (Q4 2016)

Public alpha release

Debut with brainstorming challenge for ideas and features in the next releases.

Main goals

Signal that AKASHA is a community driven project

Tap into the collective intelligence of the community

Collect and incorporate feedback from the users

Token economy challenge launched for proposals that would creatively reward participants on AKASHA

Stage 2 (TBD)

Core smart contracts breakathon

Open source the smart contracts powering AKASHA, followed by breakathon event with prizes for anyone able to exploit or break the smart contracts. Breakathon will be extended to the token contracts proposed in the next stage. Actively experiment with solutions for displaying content published inside the dapp in normal Web 2.0 browsers.

Main goals

Smart contracts crowdsourced vulnerability/exploit tests

Fix/improve the smart contracts depending on the feedback

Round 2: try to break the fixed/improved smart contracts

R&D for Web 2.0 static content gateways

Stage 3 (TBD)

Tokens, tests & integration experiments

Token research taking a more proeminent role (Filecoin, Raiden, BTC relay, ETH appcoins interoperability) combined with identity and experiments on an interactive Web 2.0 version (Metamask/Light Wallets/uPort). Analyze and A/B test the most interesting token proposals to see how it affects the health of the ecosystem and behaviour of users.

Main goals

Understand what problems we should strive to solve with a token

Test the most interesting ideas bubbling from the collective intelligence of the community

Learn if a token is indeed needed and beneficial in the ecosystem

R&D for Web 2.0 interactive version

Stage 4 (TBD)

Development roadmap proposal

Propose development roadmap for 2017 with votes counting as feedback on feature prioritization.

Main goals

Community driven development roadmap proposal

Focus attention and resources on most wanted features

Testing Web 2.0 interactive version

Fine tuning for main network launch

Stage 5 (TBD)

AKASHA v 1.0

Many variables in the equation as it all depends on the findings and lessons learned during the previous stages. If everything goes according to plan, the AKASHA contracts will be deployed on the main net, hopefully with a working Web 2.0 version for ease of access for people not interested in running their own ETH and IPFS node.

Again, this short roadmap is tentative and should be taken as such. We want to involve the community as much as possible in this project and we are open to adjusting the various stages listed above (and not only) to accomodate unforeseen events or strong feedback in areas that are not covered yet.

More details will follow in the next couple of weeks once we start sending the invites!